How To Apply Smart Filter When Analyzing Graphs

When you’re analyzing a graph with many cohorts, such as conversion of a certain goal by referrer, you will get many values. It is hard to identify the meaningful values as there can be many referrers that brought only few visitors each. Using the Smart Filter you can eliminate values that are not significant. It will remove cohorts that have conversion of 100% and cohorts that have few visitors. The resulting graph will be much easier to understand and will let you focus on the important contributors to the conversion.

In figure 1 you can see part of the many referrers that contributed to page ‘albums’. In figure 2 you can see the same graph with the Smart filter turned on. The resulting graph has only 3 values. Note that the result can be different for different analysis periods. If a referrer contributed a lot at specific time and then stops bringing traffic to specific page or goal, it will eventually be filtered out when Smart Filter applied.

Figure 1: conversion of page ‘albums’ by referrer with Smart Filter off

Figure 2: conversion of page ‘albums’ by referrer with Smart Filter on

You can apply the Smart Filter on any view and it will clean the graph for you. With the resulting graph you can continue by sorting values top-down to get the most significant contributors.